The Egg Fairy

A couple of months after we moved into Fredonia I was driving up the main street in town jus after dark. I met a car that was driving obviously very erratic. I turned around and followed it a short distance and turned my lights on to stop it. The driver, Jim Pointer, was quite nervous and smelled like beer. He failed a sobriety field test so I took him over to the jail nearby. He spent the night in the jail and I got together with Judge Joe Brooksby the next morning.

Joe said he had known Jim all his life. His family was also one of the "Dust Bowl" famlies that had settled on homestead land the government had offered in 1930's. The area South of Fredonia was good farm land but didn't have much irrigation water from Kanab Creek except on wet years.

Judge Brooksby went real light on Jim because he knew he lived alone in the house his dad had built on the farm, no utilities even. Jim got a pension from being in World War II in Europe. He suffered from "shell shock". Jim had plead guilty to drunk driving because he had been drinking some beer.

Jim had been helping Arlo Hepsworth run a small saw mill just to the North of Fredonia. Arlo had brought out some beer as they were quitting work and I am sure Jim didn't drink more than one or two. It was hard to know how much of Jim's failure to pass the sobriety test was because of his nerves or the beer. No matter, Jim felt he was wrong to be driving.

A few days later as I came out onto my front porch to go to work a carton of one dozen eggs was by the door! The eggs showed up every two or three days until one day I was leaving earlier than usual and there Jim was being the "egg fairy". I said, "why are you bringing me eggs , Jim?"

Jim said, "You probably saved my life by putting me in jail for drunk driving. I kind of had a guilty conscious for locking him up but he eased that guilt a bit. We became real good friends from that day on.